Imagine a Venn diagram with two big circles: “People who use Square”, and “People who use IFTTT”.
If you sit in the overlap between the two — Hurray! Today is your day. Square now plays friendly with IFTTT.
If you’re left wondering WTF IFTTT is, here’s the tl;dr: IFTTT (short for If This Then That) lets you connect online services together to automatically do something when something else happens.
Want to get a text every time someone uploads a photo of you on Facebook? Okay. Want the lights in your room to turn blue whenever something changes on your Dropbox? Weird, but — okay! Buy a fancy Philips Hue lightbulb, plug it into IFTTT, turn on IFTTT’s Dropbox channel, and you’re set. IFTTT is meant to make things on the Internet work together better.
With Square hooked into IFTTT, you can use Square transactions — purchases, refunds, or withdrawals/deposits— as triggers for actions on other services.
You could, for example:
- Get a text alert everytime a transaction over X is made
- Hook it into Evernote to keep an automatic running list of refunds of X value
- Post a message of congratulations on Yammer when a big sale clears
- Add all new payments to a row on a Google Docs spreadsheet
As IFTTT has actionable hooks into everything from Tumblr, to Twitter, to iOS/Android/Android Wear, to reddit, to eBay, you can do all sorts of weird stuff — it’s just a matter of poking around IFTTT’s creation tool to find something that works for you.
